How vividly every personage around that delightful "Breakfast-Table" is photographed upon the reader's mind! Can you not see the dear "Old Gentleman" just opposite the "Autocrat," as he suddenly surprises the company by repeating a beautiful hymn he learned in childhood? And the pale sweet "Schoolmistress" in her modest mourning dress? no wonder the eyes of the Autocrat frequently wandered to that part of the table and certain remarks are addressed to her alone! To tell the truth, we can't help falling in love with her ourselves! What a fine foil to this "soft-voiced little woman," is the landlady's daughter--that "tender-eyed blonde, with her long ringlets, cameo pin, gold pencil-case on a chain, locket, bracelet, album, autograph book, and accordion--who says 'Yes?' when you tell her anything, and reads Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus Cobb Junior, while her mother makes the puddings!" Then there is the "poor relation" from the country--"a somewhat more than middle-aged female, with parchment forehead and a dry little frizette shingling it, a sallow neck with a necklace of gold beads, and a black dress too rusty for recent grief." Can you not hear the very tones of her high-pitched voice as she remarks that "Buckwheat is skerce and high." "The Professor" under chloroform--"the young man whom they call John," appropriating the three peaches in illustration of the Autocrat's metaphysics--the boy, Benjamin Franklin, poring over his French exercises--the Poet, who had to leave town when the anniversaries came round--and the divinity student whose head the Autocrat tries occasionally, "as housewives try eggs," all these are so real to the reader that he can but feel they were something more than imaginary characters to the writer. Among the poems that close each number of the _Autocrat_, are some of the finest in our language. _The Chambered Nautilus_, _The Living Temple_, _The Voiceless_, and _The Two Armies_, are full of inspiring thought and deep pathos, while _The Deacon's Masterpiece_, _Parson Turell's Legacy_, _The Old Man's Dream_, and _Contentment_, sparkle with the Autocrat's own peculiar humor. "When we think of the familiar confidences of the Autocrat," says Underwood, "we might liken him to Montaigne. But when the parallel is being considered, we come upon passages so full of tingling hits or of rollicking fun, that we are sure we are mistaken, and that he resembles no one so much as Sidney Smith. But presently he sounds the depths of our consciousness, explores the concealed channels of feeling, flashes the light of genius upon our half-acknowledged thoughts, and we see that this is what neither the great Gascon nor the hearty and jovial Englishman could have attempted, ... when the world forgets the sallies that have set tables in a roar, and even the lyrics that have set a nation's heart on fire, Holmes' picture of the ship of pearl will preserve his name forever." CHAPTER X. ELSIE VENNER.